110 You'll never make a fortun with Savings Bonds. You'll never lose one either:. .t ,: + :" " ->: :. ../ :: "1. ,.... ..' ....... '" \ \' ,., <*->. ;>:, '. << , ,. ...). ') 'l.^' "\. <n t -. " ../ ::..... " ,, '4.' "^ ", Did you hear the one about the guy who in" ested hi savings and became a mil- lionaire practically overnight? \Ye all have. But for every get-rich scheme that \vorks, what you don't hear about are the thousands of people \vho invest their nest eggs un\visely and end up \vi th nothing. l haes \vhy so many people look for a safe investment. Yet one that pays. U.S. Savings Bonds are like that. :t\"()\V Bonds pay 5% interest \vhen held to n1aturity of 5 years, 10 months (4 for the first year; thereafter 5.20 to ma- turi ty). So Sa vi ngs Bonds build your i 11- ve tn1en t quicker than ever before. i\nd since Bonds are issued by the Gov- ernment, they're about as safe a way to Inake your nest egg grO\\T as ) ou'll find. A..nother thing about Bonds: they're a sure \vay to sa\ e regularly. \Yhen you sign up for the Payroll Savings Plan at \\ ork, or the Bond-a-l\lonth Plan \vhere you bank, ,-ou can count on your savings progratTI bei ng a cons tan tone. So \vhen it con1es tin1e to cash in ) our Bonds, YOU n1ay not set the \vorld of high finance on i ts ear, but rou "von't end up in the poorhouse ei there 'iJ!f "..,- :i."": - =""'==-"'1 t ) . > ") 1) I/!. q Of- "");(: 1 e r -"':"" __ '''0';:'' , Ji-: - - -- Ir>- '. . } := - 6 t C; . "' . " .. n .*: [ ml Bond.. are safe If lost, stolen, or destroyed, \.. e replace them. '\Then needed, they can be ca::.hed at your bank. Tax may be deferred until redemption. And ah, ays remember, Bond are a proud v\ ay to save. /C, ; - GS# Take stock in America. With higher paying us. Savings Bond$. 0 ,.--... -. Th U S Cov rnm nt does not P<1Y for this adv.,rh5.,m nt. - It .s presented u a public servIce In coo!>"rahon with The . Department of the Treasur)' and The Adverllslng CouncIL lulate. Already the five-hundred-and- twenty-pdge exegetic, biographical, and bibliographical Borges compilation is- sued in Paris b} L'Herne in 1964 is out of date. The air is gray with theses: on "Borges and Beowulf," on "The Infl uence of the \Vestern on the N ar- rative Pace of the Later Borges," on "Borges's Enigmatic Concern with '\Vest Side Story'" ("I have seen it many times"), on "The Real Origins of the \V ords TlÖn and U qbal in B ' S ." " B d h orges s torIes, on orges an t e Zohar ." There have been Borgts week- ends in Austin, seminars in \Videner, a large-scale symposium at the University of Oklahoma, where Borges himself was present, watching the learned sanc- tIfication of hIs other self-or, as he says, Borges J' yo. A journal of Borgesian studies is being founded. Its first issue will deal with the function of the mir- ror and the labyrinth in Borges's art, and with the dreamtigers thdt wait be- hind the mirror or, rather, in its silent Cl ystal maze With the academic circus have come tht mimes. Borges's manner is bting widely aped. There are magic turns that many writers, and even un- dergraduates gifted with a knowing ear, can simulate: the self-deprecatory deflection of Borges's tone, the occult fantastications of literary, historical ref- erence that pepper his narrative, the al- ternance of direct, bone-spare state- men t with sinuous evasion The ke) images and heraldic mdrkers of the Borges world have passed into literary CUI rency. "I've grown weary of laby- rinths and mirrors and of tigers and of al1 that sort of thing Especially when others are using them. . . . That's the ad vantage of imitators. They cure one of one's literary ills. Because one thinks: there are so many people doing that sort of thing now, there's no need for one to do it any more. Now let the other do it, and good ridddnce." But it is not pseudo-Borges that matters. The enigma is this: that tactics of feeling so specialized, so intrIcately en- meshed with a sensibility that is private in the extreme, should have so wide, so natural an echo. Like Lewis Carroll, Borges has made of autistic dreams- of a prIvate condition that is exotic and idiosyncratic to a degree-pictures, discreet but exacting summonses, that readers the world over are discovering with a senSL of perfect recognItion. Our streets and gardens, the arrowing of a lizard across the warm light, our librar- ies and circular staircases are beginning to look precisely as Borges imagined them, though the sources of his vision remain irreducibly singular, hermetic, at moments almost moon-mad The process whereb) a fantastically prIvate mode] of the world leaps beyond the wall of mirrors in which it was created and reaches out to change the general landscape of awareness is unmistakable but exceedingly difficult to talk about (how much of the vast critical litera- ture on Kafka is batHed verbiage) . That Borges's en trance on the larger scene of the imagination was preceded by a local point of vie\\'" of extreme rigor and linguIstic métier is certain. But that wil] not get us very far. The fact is that even lame translations com- municate much of his spell. The mes- sage-set in a cabalistic code, written, dS it were, in in visible ink, thrust, with thL proud casualness of deep modesty, in the most fragile of bottles-has crossed the seven seas (there are, of course, man) morc in the Borges atlas, and they are multiples of seven), to reach every kind of shore. Even those who know nothing of his masters and ear- 1y companions-Lugones, Macedonio Fernández, Evaristo Carriego-or to whom the Palermo district of Buenos Aires and the tradition of gaucho bal- lads are little more than names have f d B ' " F .. " oun access to orges s IctIons. There is a sense in which the director of the Biblioteca Nacional of Argentina is now the most original of j\nglo- American writers. This extraterritoriality may be a clue. Borges is a universalist In part this is a question of upbringing, of the years from 1 914 to 1 921 spent in Switzer- land, Italy, Spain And it arises frOin Borges's prodigious talents as a linguist. He is at home in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Anglo- Saxon, and Old Norse, as \vell as in a Spanish that is constantly shot through with Argentine elements. LIke othcr writers whose sight has failed, Borge moves with a cat's assurance through the sound-world of many tongues. He tells memorably of "Beginning the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar": At fifty generations' end (And such abysses time affords us all) I returned to the further shore of a great rIver That the vikings' dragons did not reach 1""0 the harsh and arduous words 'rhat, with a mouth no,v turned to dust I used in my "' orthumbrian, lVlercian days Before I became a Haslam or a Borges. . . . Praised be the infinite Mesh of effects and causes Which, before it shews me the mirror In which I shall see no-one or I shall see another, Grants me now this contemplation pure Of a language of the dawn. "Before I became a Borges." There IS in his penetration of different cultures a